To Become Legend
by smxnautox
Summary: He wants a fairy tale, but she writes a legend. Alistair/F!Cousland


She burns.

When Duncan leads her out, drags her from the ashes of defeat and betrayal, she rises anew, and she burns.

* * *

><p>He knows how it began.<p>

At first, before Redcliffe, there was only the respect. She is younger than him, but she leads where he cannot. He is her senior, but she is the captain of the ship, and she dutifully cares for them, for all those in need. When he holds her gaze, he is sure they say: perform or perish. She is stone, beautiful polished stone, unbreakable and unyielding, gleaming in the light of hope.

After Redcliffe, after she hands him the locket and their fingers intertwine for the first time, his eyes cling to her form when she is not looking, and he admits to himself that he loves her.

* * *

><p>It tempers her, fusing together all the little broken bits and filling in all the cracks.<p>

It gives her strength, and she lives, grasping at the tendrils that slowly sprout. At night, she holds it close, and remembers what she is here to do. There is no time for thoughts of regret, or remorse, or the thousand other things she sets aside. There is only the battle she must wage, so she carefully tends the flames that give her strength, and in return it promises victory; it whispers words of confidence, flooding the corners of her heart with images of what is to come.

When the sun rises, peeking over the horizon, she hides it away, cloaks it in the familiar mask of the highborn, because she must unite the land, and what the land needs, what the land wants, is the golden hero. The Wardens must be redeemed, and their allies must be gathered. Those who have been enslaved, abused, terrorized, exploited for generations will not be united under one banner against the encroaching Blight by anything less. There is no room for the murmurs that fester inside her. Still, she lets it prowl in the shadowy mazes of her heart, and it feeds on every kill; every life that ends at the tip of her blade is another life given to the flames growing within her. She tells herself that it is necessary, and that she controls it.

She conceals it well, and the others don't know.

Save for Alistair, that is. She isn't sure how much he knows, but they strike a precarious balance, and she almost dreams of the thousand other things she has set aside.

* * *

><p>He fully expects her to cut the man into tiny pieces. He stands by her side, and seeks her eyes, ready to intervene should the need arise.<p>

Instead, she calmly slits Howe's throat, and turns to leave before the body even begins to topple.

Later, she looks at him with a gaze that travels through him, past him, and says, "Heroes are the stuff of legends."

He is sure she will be a living legend, by the time she is done.

* * *

><p>She leads them all to victory. She leads him to victory, and to the throne.<p>

And yet, their praise only reminds her all the more of what is inside her. Neither is enough, the bitterness of revenge or the sweetness of victory, and the flames dance ever higher, barely tamed and always present. He feels this, and draws her closer. He tries to smother the flames inside her, and every touch, every look, conveys his hopes for the future they can't have. It writhes violently in response, drawing her defenses taut. The best she can achieve is a tenuous balance, an unhappy medium where she burns silently while playing the dutiful queen.

It is not rage, anymore. It had been, during the days when she followed Duncan through the wilderness, lamenting her weakness, wondering what her brother would have done. But the rage has burned away, along with all the other thoughts that haunted her, long before her final encounter with the man who had cast her down. Now she fights, because it is all she has left.

The itch beneath her skin can't be scratched, and she wonders if there would be anything left if she were to put down her arms.

* * *

><p>She drives the darkspawn back underground, and he awaits her at the palace gates, grinning from ear-to-ear.<p>

For a while, things are the way they used to be, the way they were before he became king and she became the hero of Ferelden; though the setting has changed, once again they walk hand in hand, and live the tale of happily ever after he has always wanted them to have.

For a while, he almost believes the fairy tale, and the lack of an heir does not plague his thoughts.

Then he wakes one morning, and finds her gone. She returns in time to greet a contingent from Orlais by his side, hair damp from a recent bath. He suspects the truth, but he brushes it off, and convinces himself that things are different now that the horde has broken.

In the evening, he receives new of the unfortunate demise of two of Bann Esmerelle's visiting nephews and their guards. They do not speak of it. He tells himself that the nobles must be cowed. As he lies in bed that night, he thinks of the heir he will never have and the wife who dips her hands again and again into blood.

She is not broken, there is nothing to fix, that much he has come to accept. This is who she is, now. There is guilt in him and he imagines that he sees guilt in her eyes, the same way he still sees the flickers of love, but there is nothing he can do – he has come to accept that, too. He finally discards any notions he had about happily ever after.

He is awake when she slips out, again.

They dance the dance for what feels like forever, she strays farther and farther yet always returns, and he begins to think this is their forever. But then she leaves one final time, he finds both her things and her war-hound gone, and he realizes he is not surprised.

* * *

><p>There is a part of her that loves him the way he loves her.<p>

But then there is another part of her – the part that fell to the very things that brought her here, in the pursuit of what she once believed to be justice – that has little patience for such things. It consumed her, the fire, it molded her into something new, and now she is no better than the worst of the nobility, no better than Howe. She is not the same as them, of course; they still care for material things. Inside she feels a little hollow, and a little restless, but this part of her has not much else besides the burning desire for battle. The flames have cleansed her of want for anything besides conflict; she has thrown it all away. She walked down this road to complete her quest, and there is no road back. She has written the last page, chipped it for all eternity into stone.

She knows how this story ends; she will burn and burn, until there is nothing left.

She stops many times, next to their bed, in the doorway, down the hall, at the gates, along every path she has ever taken with him, and some that she hasn't. She bows her head and she thinks of him, of the past and of all that could have been. She stands there and battles the urge to stay – one more chance, the part of her that loves him begs, the same way it begs every night, but she ignores it. She takes his first gift with her, the one she keeps carefully preserved between the pages of her journal, but he'll never know.

She leaves, because Ferelden deserves its king, and its king deserves something better. There is peace, and it is his time to lead. She will not allow him to burn too. It is the least she can do.

* * *

><p>They meet again, in the deep.<p>

He had planned for this moment. He had imagined what it would be like: he would find her besieged by darkspawn, and they would share one last glorious battle together.

He had stopped following her, the day he became king. But here he is no longer king, no longer the bastard son of Maric who had risen from being a hidden secret to become the ruler of all Ferelden. He is merely Alistair, the Grey Warden, and he would tell her that he had decided to follow his commander on one last journey. If luck was on his side, he would hold her cup her crying face in his hands, and tell her all the things she had missed; he would tell her that he knew she left for his sake, that the nobles have united behind his son, that Vigil's Keep has prospered, that the Order has been restored, that her story has become legend.

She rests against one of the many stone columns that extend upward into eternity, and he carefully removes her helmet. Some of the scars are ancient, those he remember. But there are new ones too, ones he's never touched, and he traces a newly healed cut that runs across her cheek. In this place, surrounded by fire, she had come to an end that nobody else would ever see, and not another soul would ever know the truth about them, about her.

She is still warm. Always one step short, his mind chides.

As he kneels before her lifeless form, one hand on the mortal wound that cuts across his abdomen, he finds that he finally understands. Heroes only exist in legends.

The taint in his blood sings a dreadfully sweet song, and he relents. More are coming.

He takes her hand into his own and waits.

* * *

><p><em>I own nothing. First try at anything, and English is not my native tongue. I'm sure there are glaring errors - criticism gladly accepted. :]<em>


End file.
